Federal deficit spending has short-term appeal, says Graham Steele

It's pretty fun delivering your first budget as finance minister: your government's on its honeymoon, everything you do is interpreted generously, anything bad can be blamed on your predecessor.

Bill Morneau, who rode the Trudeau rocketship from private citizen to federal finance minister in the twinkling of an election, had a good day on Tuesday.

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Never mind that, as recently as last October, the Liberals promised to run a deficit no higher than $10 billion.

That was before the election. October is a political light-year away. Election platforms are designed to win votes, not to be implemented.

And let's face it: once the country decided they'd had enough of Stephen Harper and his Conservatives, it would have voted for the Liberals no matter what they promised.

Cake for everybody

Some very fine choices were made in Tuesday's budget. Let nobody say otherwise.

But if you're going to throw gobs of money at areas that have been neglected, you really ought to think seriously about spending less somewhere else, so that you're still living within your means.

That's the tough part of politics. The choices. The balance.

The Trudeau government is evidently not interested, at all, in anything resembling balance.

It's cake for everybody. You have cake? Keep it. You want cake? Cake for you, and for you, and for you!

Of the three fiscal choices in front of any government — raise taxes, cut spending, run a deficit — the path of least resistance is always to run a deficit.

Now Trudeau, Morneau and the rest of the Liberals are singing and dancing down that path, like Julie Andrews in the opening sequence of The Sound of Music.

Unaddressed issue

Running a deficit is an attractive option because there is nobody to speak for the future citizens who will pay for it.

This, more than anything, explains the mountain of debt we have inherited and to which we continue to add.

Intergenerational equity — the fairness to our children and grandchildren of the debt we're leaving for them — is the biggest unaddressed issue in our politics.

Don't tell me, as defenders of the Trudeau government try to do, that all this deficit spending is for infrastructure.

If it were, I'd happily give them a pass. There's a yawning infrastructure deficit, and it's perfectly fair that the cost of long-lived infrastructure be spread over the generations that will benefit from it.

But this deficit isn't about infrastructure. Most of it is for new program spending, much of it permanent.

Selfies with Trudeau

Most of the Nova Scotia Liberals I know on social media have selfies with Justin Trudeau. They bask in his glow.

But I don't know how they can square Trudeau's fiscal policy with Stephen McNeil's.

When Stephen McNeil says, "Let them eat cake," it's more of a Marie Antoinette thing. Restraint. Control. Back to balance before going back to the polls.

The theory, apparently, is that voters will reward fiscal restraint.

If that philosophy worked, I might still be finance minister and not writing opinion columns for the CBC.

The Dexter government tried the Marie Antoinette thing and our political heads ended up in the same place as hers.

Justin Trudeau and his advisers figured out that restraint isn't what people want right now. Maybe it was 10 years ago, and maybe it will be 10 years hence, but not now.

Light bulb moment

As usual, this week's federal budget won't have a direct, noticeable impact on Nova Scotia's politics or finances.

The shipbuilding dollars are still there, though pushed back.

Some infrastructure money is available, though loaded towards the back end of the Liberal mandate. (But don't hold your breath waiting for federal funding for a Victoria General Hospital replacement. It's not happening.)

If the federal budget has an impact on provincial politics, it may be that it causes the McNeil government to have a light-bulb moment.

Why fuss and fight all the time?

A new round of federal stimulus spending is the perfect escape hatch.

We'd love to balance the budget, they might say, but we can't forgo all of this infrastructure cash with which our federal cousins are ready to shower us.

The McNeil government can sniff the political wind like anyone else.

As of Tuesday, deficits are officially back in fashion.